Diagrams are often used to help visualize something. What to do if you need to create a chart but don't have a software like Microsoft Office? I've collected 32 online tools for creating diagrams, flowcharts, charts and graphs and all you need to use them is a web browser.

Certainly, you won't need them all, but I offer you the choise to choose best from the best. Each of them has it's own pros and cons, and I hope you'll be able to choose the best option for you.

1. ChartGizmo

With ChartGizmo you can create different kind of charts for your website, blog and social network profiles.

2. Barchart

Simple online tool for creating bar charts. Choose your image size, colors, enter all values and export your chart as png. I created this chart below in like 2 minutes.

3. Bubbl.us

Bubbl.us is a simple and free web application that lets you brainstorm online. With Bubbl you can:

• Create colorful mind maps online
• Share and work with friends
• Embed your mind map in your blog or website
• Email and print your mind map
• Save your mind map as an image

4. AmCharts

AmCharts is a set of Flash charts for your websites and Web-based products. AmCharts can extract data from simple CSV or XML files, or they can read dynamic data generated with PHP, .NET, Java, Ruby on Rails, Perl, ColdFusion, and many other programming languages.

5. OnlineChartTool

On OnlineChartTool you can choose from 10 chart types, choose charts style, add data, customize labels and fonts, preview your graph and then save and share it.

6. ChartGo

ChartGo allows users to create charts online quickly. Create bar charts, line charts or pie charts. Simply paste your data in the chart data area and hit the create chart button. In my opinion, one of the most useful tools for creating charts.

7. Chartle

Chartle is Java based online tool that allows you to easily create different types of charts and then publish them.

8. Create A Graph

Here you will find five different graphs and charts for you to consider. You can create graphs in 3D, customize fonts, colors and then choose one of six file formats to save it.

9. Google FusionCharts Gadget

FusionCharts Google Gadget is widget that help you create animated flash charts & graphs for your web pages, blogs & Google Pages. Be it your sales chart, inventory chart or your personal weight chart, FusionCharts can render an exciting face to all your boring data tables – for free.

10. DIY Chart

DIY (Do it yourself) Chart is a web-based, simple and powerful online tool to create interactive charts and graphs from static or dynamic data which may be generated using any scripting language. The minus is that in free version there will be a logo watermark.

11. CSS Chart Generator

The only on-the-fly generator for bar charts in the net. With this easy to use interface you can create a design your bar charts in seconds. A whole bunch of features is waiting for you – from defining the output size, over colors for each bar, titles for x and y axis, to color of font and bar backgrounds and much more.

12. Hohli Online Chart Builder

Good looking jQuery using tool that allows you to choose from over 10 types of charts, customize them and get the image or embed the chart.

13. Google Chart Tools

The Google Chart Tools enable adding live charts to any web page. Using these tools allow you to create rich gallery of visualizations provided as image charts by using a simple URL request to a Google chart server or interactive charts using a Google developed JavaScript library.

14. Pie Color

Just enter number of slices, label, all the values and PieColor will generate you an image, which you can then download and share.

15. Cacoo

Cacoo is a user-friendly online drawing tool that allows you to create a variety of diagrams such as site maps, wire frames, UML and network charts. Choose from a number of stencils. It's just so easy to make great diagrams.

16. JS Charts

JS Charts is a JavaScript chart generator that requires little or no coding. JS Charts allows you to easily create charts in different templates like bar charts, pie charts or simple line graphs. Keep in mind that it's only free for non – commercial use.

17. Creately

Creately is a powerful online Organizational Chart software for creating quick and easy organizational charts, department & team org charts and even photo org charts. It works in your browser and contains templates and elements that you can use.

18. yUML

Allows you to create and share simple UML diagrams in your blogs, wikis, forums, bug-trackers and emails.

19. Mind42

Mind42 is a browser based online mind mapping application. With Mind42 installing mind mapping tools is no longer needed – for a hassle-free mind mapping experience. Just open the browser and launch the application when needed.

20. Highcharts

Highcharts is a charting library written in pure JavaScript, offering an easy way of adding interactive charts to your web site or web application. Highcharts currently supports line, spline, area, areaspline, column, bar, pie and scatter chart types.

21. Diagrammr

Create and share consecutive diagrams just by writing sentences.

22. Product Planner

Product Planner help people understand and create user flows for their web products. See how other websites and products work and then create your own.

23. LucidChart

LucidChart is an online flowchart maker app where you can create and publish customized flowcharts. It's easy to use, feature rich and has a decent free option which includes 5 MB storage for your documents and works in most of the browsers.

24. SlickPlan

SlickPlan is a web-based sitemap/flowchart generator that allows for the creation of free sitemap  and flowchart design. SlickPlan was handcrafted with PHP/MySQL and jQuery by the Dayton website design team at Atomic Interactive.

25. Charts

Useful iPhone app that lets you create and manage all kind of charts, i.e charts to track and monitor your expenses, weight, mileage and more. You can also map your data on a line, bar graph or a pie chart, apply different color schemes and share charts by email.

26. ChartPart

ChartPart is a web tool that lets you instantly create charts online. The application supports different types of charts including pie charts, line graphs and grouped bars.

27. Yellowpipe Chart Generator

Though pretty pixelated, but really easy tool to create 3D pie charts.

28. Grapher

Totally old school. Simple to use, but only bar graph with limited features is available.

29. Gliffy

With Gliffy online diagram software, you can easily create professional-quality flowcharts, diagrams, floor plans, technical drawings, and more.

30. LovelyCharts

LovelyCharts is a free online diagram editor that allow you create chart and diagram freely on the web browser. On lovely chart, there are various of diagram can be produces such as creating flowcharts, sitemaps, network diagrams, people diagrams, basic symbols,and wireframes.

31. Online Chart Generator

Really easy tool to generate charts. Choose from 9 types.

32. OWT Chart Generator

The OWT Chart Generator is an online tool to be used to produce charts. A GIF image of the chart that you specified will be displayed on the screen.

Software to create graphs

• Swiff Chart Generator 3
• MindMeister
• Smarrtdraw
• Diagram Studio
• OpenOffice

I’ve just finished the process of selling one of my sites. It was the first time I ever sold a website and, in the process of doing that, I’ve learned some very important lessons.

One of the hardest parts when you already found a buyer is transferring the website to the buyer with very small downtime. So far I haven’t encountered any article describing how to do this so I’ve decided to write one and share what I know.

1. Know the buyer

I know, I know, this phrase has become a cliche. However, the more you apply it, the more you realize how potent it is. Same with selling websites.

Ask the buyer 2 main things when you transfer the website to him:

• His domain name register. In my example, the buyer wanted to use NameCheap (which was the same I used)! This information saved me money (it costs around $8 to transfer a domain name.) How? I just contacted NameCheap and asked them whether it’s possible to transfer a new domain to another Namecheap user and they told me a free way to do it.

• His hosting. Common sense thinking here. If your hosting is different from his hosting, you want to know the name of the hosting company so in case you encounter a problem during the transferring process you can contact their live support (many hosting companies have 24/7 online live support.) In my case, both of us used Hostgator

2. Transferring the website: Data first, DNS records last

The last step of the overall process should be changing the DNS records. In Namecheap, they look like this:

The first step should be transferring the data of the website, so when you’re ready to transfer the DNS, the exactly same data is there just on a different server.

Here’s how you do that with WordPress:

• First, create an add-on domain using cPanel. I don’t recommend for the buyer to set up the domain I’m about to sell as the primary one for the sake of clarity. Again, I don’t recommend to set up the site as a primary domain. I made this mistake when trying to transfer my public records site from my other host. I couldn’t access the site at the beginning and had many problems afterward. Just don’t do the same please if you want to have 0 downtime.

• Backup the database. Use WP-DB plugin for WordPress, I’ve tested it and it produces the smallest database size.

• Install WordPress on the new web host as a clean installation (or you can copy all files, see this guide for more information.) I prefer to do a clean install (things can go wrong if you copy all the files and then you’ll have to find the root cause of the problem which is the hard part, with a clean install if a problem appears you usually know the root cause immediately.)

• After you install and configure WordPress, copy the wp-content folder from the old host to the new host. Then restore the database with phpMyAdmin (see instructions). Now you’re done with transferring the overall content and settings.

• Now, you should be able to access the domain at domainame.primarydomain.com. So if you’re trying to transfer 1stwebdesigner.com and the primary domain on your hosting is example.com, then you can access 1stwebdesigner on 1stwebdesigner.example.com. After you get to the homepage, you might get a 404 error when trying to open the posts. You need to update the Permalink structure (just to go Settings > Permalinks and click on ‘update’.) to fix this.

• Go to wp_options using phpMyAdmin and change “siteurl” and “home”. Using our previous example, if you want to transfer 1stwebdesigner.com and the primary domain for the hosting is example.com, you can access 1stwebdesigner on the new host using the URL: 1stwebdesigner.example.com. Now, after you made sure everything is okay and you’re ready to do the DNS transfer, use wp_options and change “siteurl” and “home” from 1stwebdesigner.example.com to 1stwebdesigner.com

• Go to your domain registar (Namecheap, Godaddy or some other one) and change the DNS Servers (see the first screenshot in this article.)

Now you need to wait several hours for the DNS to propagate. After that process is done, you should see your site on the new server. The process of transferring with 0 downtime is done.

To see whether the DNS servers are changed, a good trick I use is to place a simple html file on the old server. For example, I can place example.html on the old server with a simple text in it. I then try to open that file in my browser after few hours. If the file is located, that means the DNS transfer has not yet taken place. If the file is not located, that means the website is already on the new server (which doesn’t have that file.) This is helpful because the you have 2 identical copies on the servers so you need to find a separator like this.

That’s it! This process should be even simpler if you have a static website. If you try to transfer a website with Joomla or Drupal, the process should be a bit different. The basic concepts are the same, however. First transfer the data and then change the DNS servers.

Thanks for reading. How do you transfer websites between different hosts?